Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated a line that he used in the prepared statement he read at his Friday news conference on Fox News Sunday this morning. It warrants repetition. Israel and Hamas conduct in the current hostilities can be explained:

The difference between us is simple. We develop defensive systems against missiles in order to protect our civilians and they use their civilians to protect their missiles.

Here’s a brief cell phone video of “Summer Vacation In Israel” It conveys a sense of what it is like to live under constant threat of rocket attack, with only seconds to get to shelter.

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Reblogged this on My Two Cents and commented:
As a blogger and a generally outspoken person, I’m living now with the reality that to post anything remotely on the side of Israel is to make yourself open to much hate. I have seen numerous posts in just the last few days that “Israel’s aggression must be stopped”. Most of those commenters do not and have not been to Israel..neither have I. While scenes from Gaza are disturbing, I come from the perspective that Israel is the size of what-Pennsylvania? And we also know that the MSM shows us one side of pictures when they want certain reactions…be it Gaza pictures or be it Israeli pictures. The U.N. has never really been on Israels side, and certainly I think the U.N. is on nobodys side. I’ve known people from Israel, and I have known their stories about living in this reality. Before anyone gets emotionally triggered,and gets on a “hate and ban Israel” wagon, look at some alternative news sources. I’m no war monger, but Israel doesn’t need anyones permission to protect themselves, and its funny that when they do its called terrorism and barbaric. The U.N. should be disbanded, but we know it will never be so. If I hold a non internationalist libertarian thought about foreign policy-I’m sure not going to say that the world should rise against Israel, its not going to happen.

I’ve never been to Israel either, but I have read a history of Israel, and they have been remarkably restrained in the face of constant provocation. What can you do when you are confronted with mindless rage based on a society that teaches their smallest children to hate Jews, because — that’s just what Arabs do. The freest Arabs in the entire Middle East are those that stayed to become Israeli citizens.

I’ve been to Israel a number of times, but it makes absolutely zero difference; people will still tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say things favorable to Israel. I have a good friend who was a sniper in the IDF, and now she’s married to a doctor who specializes in pediatric physical therapy, and she works in the same hospital. One thing about Israeli hospitals that is unique in that part of the world – they treat everyone, regardless of religion or ethnic background. You can’t say the same for doctors in Gaza or in other parts of the region.

One thing that everyone keeps coming back to is how, in spite of all the violence, people in Israel lead lives that seem so normal; people go to work, kids go to school, cafes and restaurants do a lively business… people just doing their thing. I keep hearing commentators sounding surprised about it. The answer is quite simple, though. The Israelis have simply chosen not to be ruled by fear. That is the choice – let your fear control you, or you control your fear. Israel is well aware of how they are viewed by their Arab neighbors and are used to the treatment they receive from the UN. They are ready to defend, and they are ready to go further than that if necessary. They do not wish for hostility, but neither do they fear it. They know the lesson that Obama refuses to learn; Diplomacy without a willingness to act means nothing.

Yes, it’s interesting how Palestinian parents will bring their child with a fatal heart defect to Israeli hospitals to be saved, and then they go right back to Gaza and start hating Jews again. I did hear, on the radio yesterday, a CBS newsreader who referred to the Palestinian territory as
Gay-Zah.???? Is it possible he never heard it pronounced? Here’s a quotation from Bret Stephens that I saved:

“That Europe today should be hostile to Israel may seem a bit of a mystery, not lest given that the usual sympathy of aims between democratic states…Europe’s left sees in Israel’s political evolution a betrayal of its utopian ideals. It’s easy to forget that in the years following the establishment of Israel, many Europeans looked to it as a model socialist country . The admired its largely state-run economy and especially its collectivist kibbutzim. Hundreds of young European leftists, most of them non-Jews, flocked to these farms in the 1960s looking for thekind of workers paradise they could not find on the other side of the Berlin Wall.
This fondness, however, evaporated after the 1967 war, when Israel went from being the Middle East’s underdog to its Goliath, holding a colonial-like mandate over the lands that came into its possession. Partly under the sway of Soviet propaganda, partly in keeping with the fashion of radical chic, European leftists abruptly transferred their allegiances to the Palestinians and the P.L.O.”
I always thought the hostility had to do with the Palestinian “refugees” — that word designating the preferred underdog quality.